'Perverse Effects'

How green subsidies often increase carbon emissions.

Updated Aug. 20, 2013 8:11 p.m. ET

Anticarbon central planning was bound to distort markets, but it turns out that the planners often increase emissions as they try to engineer President Obama's "new energy economy." So concludes the National Academies, whose major report on energy subsidies deserves more attention than it has received since its June release.

By some miracle, Congress in 2008 created a National Research Council special committee to comb the tax code to figure out how specific provisions increase or decrease greenhouse gases. As...